Words. Strange And Otherwise- Vol 3

Once again, laziness won.

(That maybe the shortest story you ever read. Or a brief description of me tonight, staring at my keyboard willing words to form themselves).

If you've followed my blog for a while (and if you have, I want to find you and love you and creepily whisper "Thank you"), you'll have spotted two of these posts earlier- Volume 1 and Volume 2. Granted the third volume has taken a long time coming, but that's because I was actually trying to be useful and write.
Having given up on that (also see:Laziness), I'm sharing with you some sentences which are like lovers to me. Which means I've loved them, been in awe and ragingly jealous of their beauty, wanted to own them and settled for holding them close to my heart.

Sharing these means I'm demonstrating some sort of emotional growth, but if you diss any I'll egg your house (revenge these days is so bloody, people say " I'll cut you alive". What is that? What happened to old fashioned house-egging? I miss the 90s, but that's a post for a different day).

I've added a link to each sentence, so you can buy the book if you'd like. 

None of these (like life) is ever complete without E.E Cummings and Rumi.

(I also find that if you have a life question, you should pick a number between 1-20, then the quote against that number is the answer to your question. Or you just read something pretty). I'm done now. I promise.

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1. “Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.” 

~ Jack Kerouac

2. “So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglass-I’veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme…."

~ Nicole Krauss, A History of Love

3. "When it’s going well, the fact of it is everywhere. It’s there in the song that shuffles into your ears. It’s there in the book you’re reading. It’s there on the shelves of the store as you reach for a towel and forget about the towel. It’s there as you open the door. As you stare off into the subway, it’s what you’re looking at. You wear it on the inside of your hat. It lines your pockets. It’s the temperature. 
The hitch, of course, is that when it’s going badly, it’s in all the same places.”

~ David Levithan, (and this beautiful book) The Lover's Dictionary

4. "let it go -- the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise -- let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go -- the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers -- you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go -- the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things -- let all go
dear
so comes love”

~ E.E Cummings

5. “And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.”

~ Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

6. “Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.”

~ Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Closer


7.“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”

~ Kurt Vonnegut

8.“My library is an archive of longings.”
~Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is harnessed to flesh

9."Every breaking wave on the shore
Tells the next one "there'll be one more"
And every gambler knows that to lose
Is what you're really there for"

~ U2, Every Breaking Wave (because this song is poetry and from a time last year that makes me smile)

10."What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.”

~ Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook

11.“I'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.”

~ Jay McInerney, Bright Lights Big City

12. “And your very flesh shall be a great poem.” 
~ Walt Whitman

13.“I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?” 
~Hanif Kureshi, Intimacy

14. “Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.”

~Haruki Murakami, Kafka On The Shore

15."Sandra’s seen a leprechaun,
Eddie touched a troll,
Laurie danced with witches once,
Charlie found some goblins gold.
Donald heard a mermaid sing,
Susy spied an elf,
But all the magic I have known
I've had to make myself.”

~Shel Silverstein, Magic

16."Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. 
I mean my own body."

~C.S Lewis, A Grief Observed

17.“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.”

~Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

18.“The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”

~Zadie Smith, On Beauty

19."Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.” 

~Rumi, The Essential Rumi

20.“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

~Joan Didion